This series of events focuses on the nature and study of religion
in a world possessed of a plurality of religious traditions. Our
intention is to host both cultural representatives of the world’s
religious traditions and the academic and theological scholars who
study them.

If you are interested in having your name on an e-mailing list so
that you will be automatically informed of all such events, please
send your e-mail address to brennie@westminster.edu.

December 1st, 2nd, and 3rd, 2003: The Monks
of Gaden Lhopa Monastery.
More images below.

The first event in this bi-annual series of lectures was a vist
of The Monks of the Gaden Lhopa Monastery. The Gaden Lhopa
monastery is currently located in the Tibetan colony in exile in
India in Mundgod in the state of Karnataka. These Monks are
Tibetan Monks of the Gelugpa denomination of Tibetan Buddhism led
by Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama, winner of the Nobel Peace
Prize in 1989.

The Monks visited Westminster College from Monday 1st to Wednesday
3rd of December, 2003. While here the Monks constructed a sand mandala
representing the realm of the Bodhisattva of Compassion,
Chenrezig. This mandala is not only a beautiful work of art
but also an act of religious devotion. It was constructed over
approximately 10 hours per day for three days, and then was
ceremonially dispersed on Wednesday evening.

On Monday evening the Monks gave an introductory talk on Buddhism,
and on Tuesday evening a talk on the Buddhist understanding of
mind (both @ 6:30 in the Lakeview Witherspoon Room). They featured
in a joint Peace Studies coffeehouse/Diversity Symposium talk on
Tuesday afternoon (4:30 in the Student Lounge) and in the Faculty
Forum on Wednesday lunchtime (11:30 McKelvey Theatre).

This event was such a success that a different group of Monks
from the same monastery were invited to the College in April
of 2005, and another group in October of 2008. See the
information available here.

Here are some images of the Monk's visit and the Chenrezig Mandala
as it took shape. The Mandala was then ceremonially destroyed and
its component sand distributed
into Brittain Lake.
Click on the outlined images to see a higher resolution image.

February 18th and 19th, 2004: The Latif
Bolat Ensemble
Latif Bolat plays traditional Turkish Folk Music and devotional Sufi
songs which are called Ilahi and Nefes, from the Anatolian
peninsula. The lyrics of Ilahis or Nefeses are taken largely from
the great 13th century mystical poets Rumi and Yunus Emre.

Turkish Mystic Sufi musician and scholar Latif Bolat visited
Westminster College on February 18th and 19th as part of his world
concert tour. He presented music, poetry, Sufi stories, and images
from Turkey. On Wednesday, 18th, Mr. Bolat taught three classes in
music theory at Westminster, and that evening he offered a
presentation in the Student Lounge of the McKelvey Center on
Turkish Devotional Music and Sufi Mysticism.

On Thursday, 19th, Latif led the music department’s regular
seminar and, in the evening, gave a full two-hour concert:
“Healing sounds of Ancient Turkey: Turkish Mystic Sufi music,
poetry and images.” The program also included Traditional Turkish
folk songs as well as ballads composed by Latif Bolat. Throughout
the program devotional poetry from 13th Century Sufi poets was
recited and images of Turkish people and scenery were projected on
a screen.

One of the best-known Turkish musicians in the US, Bolat
possesses a vast repertoire, ranging from Sufi devotional songs
and Turkish Folk music to classical pieces. His mesmerizing
performances draw on ancient texts and employ traditional
instrumentation such as the baglama (long necked lute), oud and
ney flute. In addition to a full schedule of concert, lecture and
workshop engagements at universities and concert halls around the
world, he has made many live audio and television appearances and
composed soundtrack music for the PBS documentary: Muhammad:
Legacy of a Prophet and George Lucas’s Young Indiana
Jones.

September 15th, 2004:

Carlo Hawkwalker is a traditional native person involved in Native
American ceremony. He is a Pipe carrier and Sundancer. He is an
Elder for the Western Cherokee nation and has served on the Native
American Steering Committee for the prevention of substance abuse.
He was the co-facilitator of the Indigenous round table of Russia in
St. Petersburg. He is a Peacemaker involved in international issues
such as the world peace treaty campaign. He is also a storyteller.
Fenruary 24th, 2005:
Maureen Korp lectures on the history of art and the history of
religions at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada. She is also a
lecturer in the Faculty of Theology at Saint Paul’s University,
Ottawa, and has taught in Romania and the United States in faculties
of history, visual arts, and religion. Between 1995-1996, she was a
senior lecturer at the University of Bucharest, Romania. Professor
Korp’s most applauded book is Sacred Art of the Earth.
(Continuum International Publishing Group, 1997)

On Thursday, February 24th Prof. Korp gave a public lecture on "The
Soul's Journey: Constantin Brancusi's Great Vision" in the
Mueller Theatre in the McKelvey Student Center.

The Endless Column by Constantin Brancusi (1876-1956) is perhaps
the best-known feature of a war memorial complex that the sculptor
designed in 1935-1938 for the town of Targu Jiu high in the
Carpathian mountains of western Romania. The column has recently
been restored. It does not, however, stand alone. The Endless
Column is part of an extensive installation which is the
embodiment of a mythic tale--the story of the soul's journey after
death to the sun to be reborn. It is thus a singularly appropriate
topic for a consideration of the relation of art and religion.

Faith Adiele has published numerous works relating her experiences
growing up as a Nigerian-Nordic-American in a small town in
Washington State. Her works, which focus on the subjects of
identity, culture, travel and spirituality, have appeared in
numerous magazines, journals, and anthologies. Adiele has received
recognition from Best American Essays, UNESCO, Yaddo, MacDowell,
Banff Center for the Arts, Sacatar Foundation, PEN New England, The
Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Foundation and others.

Adiele has lived in Nigeria and Thailand and traveled throughout
Southeast Asia, West Africa, Scandinavia, Western Europe, Mexico
and Brazil. She is currently Assistant Professor of English at the
University of Pittsburgh, where she is at work on a family memoir,
Twins: Growing Up Nigerian-Nordic-American.

In April 2004, her travel memoir, Meeting Faith: The Forest
Journals of a Black Buddhist Nun, was released to great
acclaim by W.W. Norton & Company.

Faith's memoir about becoming Thailand’s first black Buddhist nun
received the PEN Beyond Margins Award for Best Memoir of 2005.
Educated at Harvard and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she is also
the writer/narrator/subject of My Journey Home (PBS), a
documentary about growing up with a Nordic-American single mother
and then traveling to Nigeria as an adult to find her father and
siblings; and is lead editor of the forthcoming international
anthology, Coming of Age Around the World (New Press).

Her travel essays and memoirs have been widely published and
anthologized and have received numerous awards, including a UNESCO
International Artists Bursary, Best American Essays shortlist, and
the Millennium Award from Creative Nonfiction. She currently
resides in Pittsburgh, where she is Assistant Professor of
Creative Nonfiction at the University of Pittsburgh and at work on
Twins: Growing Up Nigerian/Nordic/American, a cultural memoir that
will complete the story begun in the documentary film.

Born in Hunan Province, China, in 1941, Huang Xiang is a dissident
Chinese poet who has spent more than 10 years in prison for refusing
to submit to the Communist Party propaganda machine, Huang Xiang has
found a home for himself, his wife, and his poems in Pennsylvania.
"I left China because there was nothing else left for me to do,"
Huang said. His poetry, like Whitman's, spans a wide range of topics
from nature and love to politics.

Huang began writing poems in the 1950s and has been imprisoned
repeatedly for his work. In 1978, he founded “Enlightenment,” the
first underground writers’ society, and started a literary
magazine with the same title. In exile in the United States since
1997, he is currently resident poet in Pittsburgh under the Cities
of Asylum program for writers.

According to Susan Hutton's "Writing
on the Wall," Scholars and poets around the world consider
Huang Xiang the Walt Whitman of China. No one in China reads him.
“I do not exist there,” he said. “The people of my generation do
not know my work. Most of them don’t even know my name.”

Susan Hutton also explains that the ancient Chinese poets wrote on
walls and in caves, and carved their words in stone. “I want to
preserve and expand this Chinese tradition,” says Huang Xiang,
referring to the poems painted on his house, “where the poem is on
the street, on the stones, in the gardens. I want to beautify
every corner.”

From “Dirge
for a Young Century: A Lament for the Terrorist Attack on New York
's Twin Towers.”
Oh God, Oh God I have faith in you, I call you to appear
Be with me Be with these silent votive candles
All things on Earth that once have died must forge their way
back through the bloody muck
Under the clear sky Upon the Earth
To go on living Forever and forever
SEPTEMBER 20, 2001
In New Jersey sunroom
Translated by: ANDREW G. EMERSON.

Robert Abernethy, for ten years the host of the PBS weekly program,
“Religion and Ethics NewsWeekly,” has considerable professional
expertise in the area of talking about religion. He spoke at the North
American Undergraduate Conference on Religion and Philosophy
(NAUCORP, 2008) at Westminster on “Talking about Religion” on
Friday, March 7, 2008 at 7 p.m. in the Witherspoon Lakeview Room of
the McKelvey Campus Center. Dr. Abernethy holds honorary doctorates
from several colleges, including Westminster.
Dr. Justin Barrett, senior researcher at Oxford University’s Centre
for Anthropology and Mind, also
presented at NAUCORP. His paper was on “Cognitive Science of
Religion: What is it and why does it matter?” on Saturday, March 8,
2008 at 10:45 a.m., also in the Witherspoon Lakeview Room. Dr.
Barrett is former associate director of the International Culture
and Cognition Consortium and a founding editor of the Journal of
Cognition and Culture. He is the author of
Why Would Anyone Believe in God? and was the International
Coordinator of Experimental Research Programmes for the Institute of
Cognition and Culture at the Queen’s University, Belfast.
Dr. Donald
Kraybill is Professor of Sociology and Religious Studies and
Senior Fellow at the Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies
at Elizabethtown College. Dr. Kraybill spoke on "The Riddles of
Amish Culture" on Tuesday, Sept. 22, 2009, at 7:30 pm in the
Westminster Chapel.
A Book signing followed his talk.

This event was sponsored by Westminster's Department of Political
Science and Sociology, the First Year Program, the Peace Studies
program, the Office of Diversity Services and the Chapel Office as
well as the Heinz Lecture Series.

Dr. Kraybill has written over 20 books and numerous scholarly
articles on the Amish and other Anabaptist communities, his most
recent being Amish
Grace: How Forgiveness Transcended Tragedy on how the Amish
practiced forgiveness after the Nickel Mines school shootings. His
many years of study and expertise make him one of the foremost media
spokesmen for news affecting Amish communities.

“Scientologists and Mormons? How Two Religions Sought
Legitimacy”

Mark Oppenheimer is a leading writer and speaker about
contemporary religion. A frequent contributor to Slate, The
Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times Magazine,
Oppenheimer is the regular religion columnist for The New York
Times and is also the author of two studies of religion and
popular culture. The first, Knocking on Heaven's Door:
American Religion in the Age of Counterculture, describes
how the tumult of the 1960s affected Protestants, Catholics, and
Jews in America. The second, Thirteen and a Day: The Bar and
Bat Mitzvah Across America (2005), tells the story of unique
bar and bat mitzvahs from the Ozark Mountains to rural Louisiana
to Alaska.

Oppenheimer takes a special interest in the spiritual lives of
young people, from teenagers to people in their thirties. As a
former rock music critic and a practicing review of fiction,
Oppenheimer also enjoys showing how popular culture affects
religion. Whether it's a baptism in the Coen Brothers' movie O
Brother Where Art Thou? , a bar mitzvah on The Simpsons
or a funeral on Sex and the City, religion is everywhere
on our TVs and movie screens, and Oppenheimer watches with his
keen journalist's eye.

Oppenheimer holds a PhD in religious studies from Yale
University. He has been an NPR commentator, a newspaper editor,
and a visiting professor at Stanford and Wesleyan universities and
Hartford Seminary. He has delivered his humorous, accessible,
intellectual speeches at colleges, high schools, churches,
synagogues, and civic group meetings across the country.

“Can We Speak of a Secular Tradition of Islam”

Ruth Mas was born in Madrid, Spain and was raised in Montreal,
Canada. While completing a B.A. degree in French-English
Translation, she found herself traveling through Europe and
Morocco
and decided to pursue graduate studies in Islam and
Religion. After thorough training in classical Islamic thought
with
Michael E. Marmura, she specialized in the
thought of contemporary secular-liberal Muslim intellectuals. Her
dissertation, “Margins of Tawhid: Liberalism and the Discourse of
Plurality in Contemporary Islamic Thought,” was completed in 2006
under the supervision of Charles Hirschkind and James DiCenso. It
draws on the work of Michel Foucault, Talal Asad and Judith Butler
to think through the question of the constitution of modern
Islamic
subjects, and issues of secular-liberal governance and
contemporary
Islam in France.

Mas was recognized
by Massey College at the University of Toronto in 2002, when she
was
awarded the Morris Wayman Prize for Interdisciplinary Research for
her work on liberalism and Islam. In 2003 and 2004 she was a
postdoctoral
research fellow at the Institute for the Advanced Study of the
Humanities, Essen, Germany. In 2007, she was invited to Berlin as
a visiting scholar
by the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at Viadrina
University.

Most recently, she has pursued her study of Islam at Cornell
University’s School of Criticism and
Theory . She has also participated in the
Seminar in Experimental Critical Theory at the University of
California, Irvine. Her
current work focuses on the connections between liberalism and
affect, and their implications for Muslim subjects.

Mas is a 2008-2009 Fellow at the Centre for Humanities and the
Arts
at CU-Boulder and was a 2009-2010 Fellow at Cornell.

This web-site is developed and maintained by Bryan Rennie, the Vira
I. Heinz Professor of Religion at Westminster College. Please
address all questions, comments and corrections (and any good
photographs that you might have of these events) to me at brennie@westminster.edu.